The impacts of internal threats towards routing protocol for low power and lossy network performance

Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy network (RPL) is the underlying routing protocol of 6LoWPAN standard to enable the integration of Wireless Sensor Network on the Internet. Security is an essential requirement for the protocol/standard to be public accepted. One major security issue of RPL is the non-tamper resistant nature of the wireless sensor device, which can make it easy to be compromised and leads to cryptography keys exposed. If this happens, the attackers can join the network as the internal legitimate users and can manipulate the network operation based on controlling the compromised nodes. These internal attackers can make severe consequences to the network performance. In this paper, we present a simulation-based study of the impacts of different types of such attacks on RPL. We consider several new internal threats towards RPL, namely Rank attack, Local Repair attack, Neighbour attack and DIS attack. Specifically we study how the network performance can be affected by those attacks through metrics such as end-to-end delay, delivery ratio and control overhead generated. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that studies the vulnerability and the performance of RPL under these internal security threats